An Open Letter To Pirated Artists

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Infopolicy – Lionel Dricot

Infopolicy – Lionel Dricot

In an open letter to artists, Lionel Dricot explains his own thinking as a creator of art and writings. Mr. Dricot outlines why people in general are not prepared to pay if the money goes to middlemen, but are generally prepared to support the artists directly. The enemy is not pirates, Mr. Dricot explains – the enemy are the parasitic middlemen who have been taking 95% of the cut and are fighting to lock everybody else out.

With Flattr, I earned a total of € 34.70 for that post and its French translation. If I had a 1€ paywall, this post alone would be worth € 100,000. Even considering that only 10% of readers would pay, it would still be around € 10,000. Not bad, isn’t it?

But if I charged visitors, nobody would have read that text in the first place. It would never have become viral and I would not have earned a single euro on Flattr. This seems obvious, isn’t it? It is nevertheless exactly what the entertainment industry makes you believe when they say that pirates steal. Pirates steal your art as much as readers stole mine when reading my blog post.

The fundamental error is to consider art as a commodity. Even selling MP3 or eBooks follows the principle of hardware. Buyers keep their “MP3s” as a collection of records. DRM attempts to mimic physical constraints in the virtual world.

But what is your goal as an artist? Selling records, books and paintings? Or to be read, listened to and admired? Hopefully, money put aside, you would choose the second. Discs and books are only physical mediums that allow you to broadcast your art.

Many of you can not make a living out of art. It is a sad but perfectly normal situation. Personally, I also consider myself as an artist. After all, I blog and I write fiction. I would like to make a living out of it in order to devote myself full time to writing. This is obviously not the case. Either I did not found the right business model or I don’t have enough talent. Is it the fault of people who read my blog for free? Definitely not: they spread my writings and give me sometimes small donations. Yet again, this is exactly what the industry makes you believe: that your fans are your enemies, those that prevent you from living from your talent.

You want to broadcast your art, and if possible, earn money. We want to enjoy your art, and if possible, contribute financially to your talent.

However, when we buy your art “legally”, we know that over 95% of our money goes to intermediaries. We consider most of them unnecessary and harmful to society. All the sweat, all the talent that you put in your art is vampirized at 95% by these parasites. We are also reluctant to pay the same price for a fun song that we will listen to once or twice or a hymn that will resonate for every morning of our lives.

We are ready to invest in the launch of your projects, eg on Kickstarter. But we do not want to pay to “own” a file. It does not make any sense. We do not imagine paying a fixed price each time we “consume” a piece of art. Your hardcore fans would be ruined. Not to mention those who listen to background music while working. It would be a barrier to your success. My personal solution is to give, every month, a fixed amount through Flattr. On Grooveshark, an artist is Flattred if I listened to one of his song at least once during the month. I’d like to see that kind of automatism being generalized for any content like ebooks and movies.

If we generalize such a system, your interest as an artist would become to be heard, read, admired. Even if it is years later, allowing you to focus on the long term. On the opposite, mixing a work with its physical support encourages quick consumption, aggressive marketing and ephemeral success before falling into oblivion.

In order to preserve its own obsolete interests, the entertainment industry has lied to you pretending that we were your worst enemy, they benefited from the vast majority of your earnings, they threatened your fans as criminals, they perverted our laws, our politicians and our educational system, they standardized our culture and creativity. Simple tactics: they oppose us and benefit. However, we share a common interest: that you could devote yourself to your art without having to flip burgers. While their own is to earn money, regardless of your accomplishment.

Dear artists, would you embark on a pirate ship bound for the new world where fans and artists cooperate? Everything has to be discovered yet. Flattr is anecdotal and, moreover, might be more an experiment than a solution. Same for online donations. Many problems have to be solved. This is why we need you and your creativity. But not those leeches on your back.

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About The Author: Lionel Dricot

Lionel Dricot is a writer, speaker, startup coach, futurologist and author of a few books in French. As a member of the Belgian Pirate Party, he was 14 votes away from
becoming the first elected pirate in Belgium. He also blogs in
Frenglish on ploum.net and is a Twitter/G+ addict.

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I hope creators listen to this! While getting paid is important for creators, limiting the reach of creative work can only limit the pool of potential paying customers.

The only thing is, I caution you against pushing the “95% goes to middlemen” thing as a general rule. While this certainly seem true for most musicians, in other areas, with newer platforms, royalties for creators are going up. For example, writers on Kindle can get as much as 70% of what the reader pays. Of course, even in this case it still wrong to control people’s ability to share and spread your work. And, as you showed with your post, FORCING readers/consumers past a paywall only means that there will be fewer readers/consumers – and less money!

But anyway, a good letter for creators to read – lets hope some of them do.

I read this and agree with it, but putting myself in the shoes of an aspiring full-time creator, I don’t see how this goes far enough.

So we all agree that the middlemen are evil. Fine. Now what? Say I write fiction, or I make music. Where do I publish it to get read/heard and maybe earn a bit of money with it? There is no such place where consumers go to find free, unencumbered, safe-to-copy fiction. There are only best-seller lists of encumbered works and shops like Amazon to sell it.

Good writers make use of the content industry because it does their marketing for them. For successful artists, it is worth it, otherwise many of them wouldn’t do it. They’re not all stupid.

What we need is a concerted effort of the pro-free-media community to come up with a good marketing network. We need artists to be able to publish their works at a push of a button without having to worry about disappearing into oblivion, and without having to rely on word-of-mouth on social media. For musicians, we need something very much like Grooveshark, Spotify or last.fm except where every music track that you like you can freely download. But these systems must be crafted well to make it maximally easy for the consumer to support the artist with a donation. So far I have not seen such a platform, even though it seems to be obvious that we need it.

“Piracy” (file-sharing) does all that marketing for you. We still need platform for simple payments / donations however. And these payments need to be resilient to attacks from third party interests. Clearly any centralized payment method won’t do. Card companies and banks can join up with the middle men to cut funding, so we can’t rely on them. We need decentralized cryptocurrencies where no third party can spy or block transactions. Then they’re of course gonna try and get these outlawed too by associating them with criminal activity such as terrorist funding, tax evasion or money laundering..

Actually, there’s plenty of smaller publishers that are fair to writers. When we’re talking about the ‘evil middlemen’, we’re talking about the monolithic ones, your RIAAs, your MPAAs, New York publishers, etc.

There is a new breed of small, creator-friendly publishers out there. For instance, anything Adult, I’d reccomend someone like Sizzler editions, but there are others, to the point Piers Anthony has a list of HUNDREDS of publishers on his site. (http://www.hipiers.com/publishing.html)

You can do it yourself with music, and even films, but it’s all a tradeoff now between how long you want to spend marketing/promoting, and how much creating.

“What we need is a concerted effort of the pro-free-media community to come up with a good marketing network. We need artists to be able to publish their works at a push of a button…”

Promo Bay looks like it.

“But these systems must be crafted well to make it maximally easy for the consumer to support the artist with a donation. So far I have not seen such a platform, even though it seems to be obvious that we need it.”

And if the established publishing industry has their way we never will. Flattr is today the one and only way in which you can easily support an artist. I see AeliusBlythe has commented and would recommend you to read up on her own run-ins with amazon and the difficulty presented in even trying to make a CC-work available.

And this is the main problem. If ten million readers read your books and only 1% of them are willing to pay 1€ that still leaves you with 100,000 euro. Bloggers today have it easier as they can subsist on ads and active readership – which may not be a good alternative for an author wishing to publish a physical edition. Bloggers, it can be noted, earn their revenue by the reader donating “eyeball time” – a very easy and painless way to make a living. The hoops you usually have to jump through in order to perform the equivalent of tossing a coin in a hat, however, usually aren’t worth it, and so donations present a high convenience barrier.

It is worth noting also that the barriers thrown up by law allowing an artist to publish him/herself can be tremendous, all thanks to the publishers – google the “lang law” in france or the GEMA/Youtube conflict for how pervasive and intrusive the control mechanisms legislated into existence can become.

As far as music goes…Spotify could have been a solution. But not after they had to spend six years negotiating different deals and safeguards with the distributors which insisted on retaining the vast majority of the earnings.

It really becomes a chicken-and-egg problem at this point. I’m leaning toward the idea that in practice it won’t be possible to generate a true artist promo platform as easy and convenient as it needs to be until current copyright law gets abridged with an axe.

“What we need is a concerted effort of the pro-free-media community to come up with a good marketing network.”

Absolutely.

Specifically, I’d advocate a service mixing the operating principles of Flattr and Last.FM, taking the micropayment model of the latter and integrating it with the scrobbling feature of the former. Spotify kind of does this, but is much more rigid in its operation. There are hurdles to overcome here, especially as relates to the handling of money (we are talking about a service with essentially the same security and reliability requirements of PayPal), but a sufficiently motivated group of sufficiently intelligent people is one of the better ways to build universal, comprehensive services (witness Wikipedia or the Mozilla foundation).

Ultimately, I’d like to see this ‘scrobbling’ capacity available as a plugin for things like PDF readers and video player.s. ideally, users could (in principle, at least) specify an arbitrary payment scheme through an APi (want to contribute by play time instead of play count? We can do that. How about marking out your favorite artist for triple profit? No problem. Maybe you want to cap what you pay for music (as opposed to aforementioned literary, video or other content) to 70% of budget, or assign a lower, 20% weight to things played during work hours, when it’s mostly going to be on in the background. For a robust system, all this should be unproblematic — just a matter of implementing the formulas on the user side of the interface.

Sure, most people would just adopt any moderately reasonable defaults you give them, but the ‘standard model’ is always going to be in flux, so modifiability is essential. Not to mention that giving the motivated user a chance to config its heart out (with the best of the unix geeks, I’m sure) is empowering enough to almost be seen as an end in itself.

I do have some quarrel with the letter itself, but I think I’ll address that in another comment — some time, a bit of thought, and a glass of Portugese wine later.

I think you haven’t looked deep enough into this. I like that the new models don’t force stuff down your throat constantly like radio/tv/magazine ads.
Look at places like bandcamp/soundcloud/route63/last.fm et al. There are a LOT of content discovery mechanisms out there, you just need to put a bit of effort in, which is a small trade-off for individuality and choosing your own media to consume.

I have a friend who is in the process of writing an academic textbook. On the first pressing, he will get NOTHING – zero percent. If the publisher decides to go for a second pressing, he will get €1 on a cover price of €30 (to be fair, he coauthored with someone else, so presumably would have got €2 if he’d done it by himself).

Of course, his academic reputation will benefit, but arguably would do more so if the book circulated without restriction.

Moral of the story: NEVER feel bad about photocopying or downloading textbooks.

I have a friend who is in the process of writing an academic textbook. On the first pressing, he will get NOTHING – zero percent. If the publisher decides to go for a second pressing, he will get €1 on a cover price of €30 (to be fair, he coauthored with someone else, so presumably would have got €2 if he’d done it by himself).

Of course, his academic reputation will benefit, but arguably would do more so if the book circulated without restriction.

Moral of the story: NEVER feel bad about photocopying or downloading textbooks.

Well put. Many artists already know this, but they are being scared into not daring to do anything about it, just as prominent critics of copy rights such as Aaron are systematically bullied into not daring to either act or speak out about this.

very good letter containing a lot of sensible explanations as to what is really going on which is nothing like the studios and labels versions. one reason a lot of artists fail to do anything is because there are still a few very successful ones from years ago. that is the important point. they are from years ago, when the majority of artists had no other option but to put themselves in the hands of the parasites. not so today! many more options available with kickstarter being a popular choice.
like those above, i hope a lot of artists read this, take notice and have the sense and the balls to go it alone. however, given the conduct of the labels etc, i wouldn’t be surprised to find the letter removed over copyright infringement claims! (sarc)

One of my favorite authors, Eric flint, has become successful, not only because he writes excellent Science-Fiction/Fantasy, but also because he actually shares a representative selection of his books in the Baen Free Library. Anyone wanting to know if he is any good to read, can simply read a few of his free books and go on from there.

I did, I liked them and by now there is only one author that I have spend more money on in the last 5 years. I also discovered several other new favorite authors that way.

Reading your text I take it that you never ever did work with an film-book-magazine-editor, recording studio, production house, distributor, music-book-publisher, record label, film-TV-music-producer, TV channel, cinema chain, PR company or any of the individuals you call “intermediaries. We consider most of them unnecessary and harmful to society”. And hence you do not understand what they do.
We “the creatives” who do work with them usually find them knowledgeable, skilled and often useful when it comes to realising our projects. There are of course less pleasant individuals as well, but hey, everyones got an asshole.
We who do work with the intermediaries 2013 do read our contracts more carefully than in 1992 (the date of the paper you link to) and we now have the choice to do Kickstarter projects whenever we feel like it (wonderful, and I do work on those every now and then but they tend to not really go far when it comes to paying for the kids clothes) and we still have the option to present our concept to a larger company that will advance us money if they like the idea.
That money will allow us to eat, live and create for a year or so and those companies will then help us, produce, create, market our films, music, books etc etc.
The company will certainly take a large % of the turnover/profits for their services and if we don´t like that we just have to go the Kickstarter route or borrow money in the bank.

However, this is our choices to make not yours.

Most of us do not look at the individual downloader as the “enemy” at all but we most surly do not appreciate entities like TPB making money out of our content without sharing a single cent with those who created the content in the first place.

TPB doesn’t make money
the ads are just there to cover the running costs

besides, how much money do you get when your work is rented in a library?
TPB is nothing more than a more efficient library, it helps artists get exposure, it helps poorer people or people in region deemed “not worthy enough” by the entertainment industry to get their hands on all the culture they need; it is an overall good force for society and culture

“TPB doesn’t make money the ads are just there to cover the running costs”
Oh, and where is the proof of that?
Where is the transparency?
Accordingly to the court case in Sweden TPB made plenty of money.

“besides, how much money do you get when your work is rented in a library?”
Libraries are governmentally sanctioned monopolies, TPB is not.

“TPB is nothing more than a more efficient library,”
A library without the approval of the creators of the films that TPB make their money of. Libraries have negotiations with the creators and agreements, TPB does not.

” it helps artists get exposure,”
The exposure that most of the filmmakers, artists and authors have not asked for and would like to not to have.

“it helps poorer people or people in region deemed “not worthy enough” by the entertainment industry to get their hands on all the culture they need;”
Yeah, it is really important for “poorer” people to get hold of Batman, Avengers, Solsidan, Sällskapsresan, Göta Kanal, The Hangover, Lady Gaga and Justin B, especially since most of the “poorer” people in the world have not got computers nor an internet connection.

” it is an overall good force for society and culture”
Anyone who abuse the rights of others are not doing anything good for society nor culture.

It is as usual also interesting that there are so few pirates creating anything anyone seem to care about.
Like Anna Trobergs “book” Chefer frpn helvetet, no one seem to read it – download it or care about it and yet it is the original PP new leader who wrote it.
Where are the free translations into Swahili, into Hindi, into Pashto in order to spread the important PP literature to the poor?
How many times has it been downloaded from TPB, right now there seem to be 1 seeder and no leecher.

in the court case no proof was presented that they made any money, so until someone proves otherwise I’m going to trust them when they say they just need the money to run the site
it has been without ads for a long time, only when it became too costly for them to pay for it they started running ads

while it is true that libraries in many countries are staterun, that doesn’t change the fact that they offer the same service as TPB does, just in a less convenient fashion and also without paying the “creators”

are you now judging what culture is “worthy” to be shared?
so what if the people want to see Avengers, Batman, etc. but can’t afford it? last time I checked those movies made back their budget many times over
if something gets pirated a lot it also gets bought a lot, not necessarily by the same people, but there is a connection

The verdict in English states :
“It has been confirmed that the operation of The Pirate Bay has generated advertising revenue which, during the period indicated in the indictment, has amounted to at least SEK 1,200,000.”

So your personal opinion in regards of the evidence seem to differ drastically from the three different levels of courtrooms that has processed the material.

There is advertising present no matter from where you are when you visit TPB,

“while it is true that libraries in many countries are staterun, that doesn’t change the fact that they offer the same service as TPB does, just in a less convenient fashion and also without paying the “creators”
In full agreement with the creators, TPB has no such agreement and TPB is not a state licensed activity.

“are you now judging what culture is “worthy” to be shared?
so what if the people want to see Avengers, Batman, etc. but can’t afford it?”
And so what, there are a lot of things people want but can´t afford without the creator in any manner what so ever being responsible for supplying it.

And it is you who state “get their hands on all the culture they need;” Do anyone need Batman?

“if something gets pirated a lot it also gets bought a lot, not necessarily by the same people, but there is a connection”
And again, so what?
A lot of products makes it´s money back and makes a profit, but that does not mean that the creators has to accept entities like TPB making money out of the creators products, products the TPB has no rights to.

how was it confirmed?
was there any sort of proof?
it is a well known fact that the judges were biased, so their judgement alone is no proof whatsoever.

I personally follow “innocent until proven guilty”, even if the courts in Sweden disagree with me on that one

something being staterun doesn’t make it better or worse
and I’m sure if the content mafia could find a way to outlaw public libraries they would do so, it’s just that that is a lost battle for them, libraries have too much public support

it isn’t a matter of “needing” Batman, I’m sure people could live without having seen the movie. but their life is enriched by seeing it (in my opinion at least). it may not be the culture they deserve, but it is the culture they need! (before you jump on me on that sentence, it is a modified quote from the movie ;))

why should people be kept from free culture just because some oligarchs say so?
as could be seen in the last 10 years culture lives on in perfect harmony with piracy, in fact more culture than ever is created now, the MPAA just posted a record profit again, etc.
if piracy really does cause harm, I’m not seeing it

if you blame piracy for your failings as an artist, take a step back and examine if you are really as good as you think you are

“how was it confirmed?
was there any sort of proof?”
So obviously you have not read the verdict and you did not follow the trial. (You are only reciting other sources that did not read the verdict.)
If you had you would have known that there was plenty of evidence in regards of the transactions and money coming in from advertising especially through Eastpoint.

“it is a well known fact that the judges were biased, so their judgement alone is no proof whatsoever.”
No one has claimed that anyone in the highest court of Sweden was biased, the highest court upheld the verdict.

“I personally follow “innocent until proven guilty”, even if the courts in Sweden disagree with me on that one”
They have been proven guilty and Sweden is no more corrupt than any other western country, Sweden is actually labelled as one of the least corrupt and one of the strongest democracies in the world.

“something being staterun doesn’t make it better or worse”
It makes it possible for those whose material is being abused to express their opinion and have their rights protected by the state.

“and I’m sure if the content mafia could find a way to outlaw public libraries they would do so, it’s just that that is a lost battle for them, libraries have too much public support”
Libraries in Sweden are actually diminishing and fewer and fewer people use them.

“it isn’t a matter of “needing” Batman, I’m sure people could live without having seen the movie. but their life is enriched by seeing it (in my opinion at least).”
So what, a lot of things will enrich peoples lives without the producers of those things in any way would be obliged to supply the product for free.

“it may not be the culture they deserve, but it is the culture they need! (before you jump on me on that sentence, it is a modified quote from the movie ;))”
Again, what people need is one thing, what producers of movies has to give is something else.

“why should people be kept from free culture just because some oligarchs say so?”
No one is kept from anything, but everything has a price and if you can´t pay, you don´t get.

“as could be seen in the last 10 years culture lives on in perfect harmony with piracy,”
LOL. Yeah most artists has to spend the larger part of the year out on tours in order to make money, they have less and less time to actually create music. The power has shifted from record companies to tour managers and those that book and the amount of views on Youtube is the measurement used to negotiate fees for gigs. The artists are today paying for music videos and promotion with money usually borrowed from managers. Great situation!!!

“in fact more culture than ever is created now, the MPAA just posted a record profit again, etc.”
Yeah, fewer artist and fewer movies than ever are pulling in the largest amount of money ever. The whole thing reminds me more of when free radio was introduced to Sweden in the 80s and everyone thought it would result in more and better music – the opposite happened.

“if piracy really does cause harm, I’m not seeing it”
Yeah, should you see it? Do you work with books, music, films? Do you work with people who today has a lower salary then what they had 10 years ago – for performing twice the amount of work?

“if you blame piracy for your failings as an artist, take a step back and examine if you are really as good as you think you are”
LOL again, I have been working with this stuff for more than 25 years and I am doing very well since my skills (apart as an artist in my own name) are for hire for other creators no matter what they are doing – advertising, movies, music, images. I just have to travel a bit further to get decent budgets – the Swedish ones all died a long time ago.

“Neil Gaiman is well spoken and write great books.
What ever works for him is great, but no matter what – it is his choice to make, not Lionels.”

It is not the choice for a restaurant – no matter how popular to stop unwanted competition. To the younger generations today File-Sharing is a hobby just as much in the same sense as home-cooking, home-hair-cutting, renovation of apartments et.c. Those industries have no fucking “rights” to stop unwanted hobby-competition and there really is no reason why the same should not apply to publishing “industry”.

Copy rights are just bad excuses for making money on old work over and over again. Copies have basically become commercials for investing in Future Work.

“It is not the choice for a restaurant – no matter how popular to stop unwanted competition.”
Who is stopping any competition? Everyone is free to make their own films – No one is stopping them. Everyone is free to make their own music, write their own books or interpret others.
Restaurants do however sell tangible products one by one, a very different business in comparison to that of selling experiences of the immaterial kind.

“To the younger generations today File-Sharing is a hobby just as much in the same sense as home-cooking, home-hair-cutting, renovation of apartments et.c.”
Everyone is free to create their own music and films. Everyone is also free- to copy other creators films and music – in their homes. So everyone is free to handle music and films in the same manner as the do their home-cooking, home-hair-cutting etc etc

“Those industries have no fucking “rights” to stop unwanted hobby-competition and there really is no reason why the same should not apply to publishing “industry”.”
As I wrote above, everyone is entitled to make their own music and their own films. Everyone is also entitled to make copies of other creators material.
The thing that the industry most surly has the right to stop are entities like TPB that make money out of the creators material without sharing a singe penny with the creators.

“Copy rights are just bad excuses for making money on old work over and over again.”
Copyright is there to make sure that the writer of the music and lyrics gets their fare share of the income the material the created brings in. The composer of music get´s a bit more of 9% of the sales of the recordings of his songs. Similar for the director and writer of movies and TV etc etc.
How do we get paid over and over again?
You mean in the same way that a landowner charges a yearly fee for the land he is renting out, year after year after year?

“Copies have basically become commercials for investing in Future Work.”
No, copies are actually no longer interesting when it comes to music, streaming and the turnover from streaming services is what is interesting now in regards of music (kids no longer save mp3s in their computers of phones). And the signs are there that the same ting is starting to happen in regards of films and TV.

Well, actually, no.. If you see what is happening.. all channels which are not under control of established media businesses – for instance megaupload – are under constant attack (with copyright claims) – to try and make it harder and harder for people to reach out without the traditional “publishing” firms. It is like trying to shut down the whole postal service or other transport business because some few per million send drugs or other illegal items. They are aiming for the messengers and not for the criminals. And that is totally unacceptable, and has been totally unacceptable in any remotely liberal democracy.

“Well, actually, no.. If you see what is happening.. all channels which are not under control of established media businesses – for instance megaupload – are under constant attack (with copyright claims) – to try and make it harder and harder for people to reach out without the traditional “publishing” firms.”

Megaupload and TPB are making money from the publishing of material they do not have the right to publish or spread.
You can publish all the music and all films you create yourself on your own webpage, you can publish it on Youtube and you can publish it on Jamendo, you can publish it on Vimeo and you can publish it on Myspace, you can publish it on Last.fm and you can publish it on Mp3.com and you can use e-junkie.com if you want to charge for any of your stuff.

Sten says “Copyright is there to make sure that the writer of the music and lyrics gets their fare share of the income the material the created brings in. The composer of music get´s a bit more of 9% of the sales of the recordings of his songs. Similar for the director and writer of movies and TV etc etc.”
Do you really consider 9% a fair cut, while talentless middlemen and corporate monopolies take the other 91%.
I would rather make 91% less sales than let these greedy hacks profit off my work.

One of my favorit authors, Eric Flint, wrote several columns in 2006, explaining why he views DRM as one of the stupidest things for artists to support.

He also writes a lot that might be important for beginning autors to become successful and why not all creative activities are similar. The market conditions for novelists, musicians and actors f.i. are fundamentally different.

If you want an inside view from a succesful novelist, these columns have been gathered at:

The problem with your argument is that while you moan about the middlemen taking their cut, with this model the artist still stands a chance of being paid SOMETHING.

In the world of piracy, the artist gets NOTHING. The uploaders get paid via affiliate deals and premium account kick-backs by cyberlocker owners. The cyberlocker owners get paid from premium accounts and advertising. Even on torrent sites, adverts fund everything.

Don’t believe me? Go to somewhere like WJunction (the W stands for Warez) and see who’s making the money. Then tell me how that’s noble or fair on creators?

And don’t tell me ‘sharing is caring’ or how ‘the old way of doing business is redundant’ because it seems to suit pirates when they make a $ or thousand out of it.

If there was a true alternative most artists would embrace it. It’s in an artist’s nature to want freedom and as such an artist who creates something should be entitled to do what he or she wants with that creation without others deciding that they know better. If the artist wants to give that work away for free it is their right. If they want to monetize it, again, that is their right. Let the market decide what’s of value – not some self-entitled cash whore who doesn’t really care what they pirate, just so long as there’s a kick-back for them somewhere along the line.

The fact that pirates remove that freedom while claiming they know better is arrogance personified. When you factor in that pirates also make money from the work of others while claiming to hide behind some noble cause, that’s unethical, unfair and unforgivable.

Maybe it’s time the world of piracy got its own house in order before it lectures truly creative people what’s best for them?

I totally agree with this article, these are my thoughts exactly (oh wait, you copied my thoughts… isn’t that infringement? ;) )

The middle men are always the problem, we should get rid of them whenever possible. I work as a cameraman and I also know these types of bloodsuckers who try to get in between you and your customers. Their goal is to pretend to be doing some essential work, but when you look closely, you see that they just sit in between, do just nothing and get a big percentage of the money that you should be getting.

For music, I think streaming services are the future – affordable, easy access to ALL music in just one place. There is a free option with some commercials in between, so even poor kids can listen to everything they want. Plus the artists get fairly paid, as well.

We really need that for tv shows, too! All shows (and I mean ALL shows) available for streaming on one site with different payment options from free (with commercials) to premium (with download an offline availability in HD).
Current legal access to tv shows is a nightmare, which is why people rather pay money to one click hosters. Money that could be going to the creators of these shows directly! People are willing to pay, they just want easy, uncomplicated access to all shows and they don’t want to spend their life savings on it neither.

About The Author

Lionel Dricot is a writer, speaker, startup coach, futurologist and author of a few books in French. As a member of the Belgian Pirate Party, he was 14 votes away from
becoming the first elected pirate in Belgium. He also blogs in
Frenglish on ploum.net and is a Twitter/G+ addict.